


unless thou return again

by noahfronsenburg



Category: Fire Emblem: Kakusei | Fire Emblem: Awakening
Genre: Crisis of Faith, F/M, Nagamas 2018, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-01
Updated: 2019-02-01
Packaged: 2019-10-20 07:08:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17617805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noahfronsenburg/pseuds/noahfronsenburg
Summary: And one day, Robin stops him, takes his hands in hers, and says: “When was the last time you prayed?”





	unless thou return again

**Author's Note:**

  * For [GhostEyeliner](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GhostEyeliner/gifts).



> happy nagamas! i hope your holidays went well and your year has started off good, and that this is what you were hoping for! this is for the prompt "Robin/Libra - 'finding faith in you instead of a god'"
> 
> title from 335, Return Again.

For most of his life, Libra had never really considered the application of the term  _crisis of faith_ , because his faith has never been a crisis. It is security, safe as houses; he has built a life based on belief in the same way other people build their lives based on their families, their countries, their futures. Libra has been secure and comfortable in the direction his life will go since he knew what direction his life would go.

But he had also never planned to fight  _a god_ , either, and that’s the sort of thing that you can’t really shut your eyes to and move on from. There’s not really a way past that. You can’t wake up one morning and stop remembering what a god looks like as it dies. Knowing a god is real in a tangible, visible, tactile way, because you’ve had to wipe its blood off of your hands, rather than in the way that you know someone, some _thing,_ is there for you.

You can’t forget that.

So Libra does what everyone else does, after the wars: he goes home, and follows his wife, and tries to live his life day to day, in the way that you do. He wakes up. He sees to the needs of the many orphans in Ylisstol, he attends council meetings and gives gentle commentary where he can, he goes home and cooks dinner while Robin passes out at her desk, helps Morgan finish his mother's work, and goes to bed. Every day is rote. Every day is repeated, like the taste of paper dissolving slowly on the back of his tongue.

And one day, Robin stops him as he goes to cook dinner, and takes his hands in hers, and says: “When was the last time you prayed?”

Libra stares at their hands, joined, linked. He has spent so much of his life looking at his hands and seeing blood on them, embedded beneath his nails even when he scrubs them raw, but now he cannot even see that stain beneath Robin’s. There is a world out there that Robin guided through the underworld and out the other side of the lighted tomb, and she has buried more bodies by her own hand than he has ever touched. You do not make the future from whole cloth without scraps; you do not win a war without losing something else.

But it wasn’t Robin who stood in the blood of the corpse of a god, and exulted.

“I don’t know,” Libra says at last. His voice doesn’t shake.

His hands do.

 

 

So they move out to the country, and Morgan takes the role of tactician for a while. Libra wakes up in the morning and lays in bed and doesn’t move, stares at the ceiling and listens to the sounds of Robin trying and failing to get eggs from the chickens. He goes out every afternoon in only his breeches and takes an iron axe that’s never seen any blood on its edge and chops up logs into pegs to build with and slowly puts together an orphanage, one wall at a time. He spends hours, exhausted, sitting on a stump and staring into the distance, sweat drenching his back and the small of his neck, his hair pinned to the top of his head, saying nothing and listening to birds and the wind.

He goes to a chapel one day and sits in the front pew, and feels nothing at all. There’s a difference between godhood, ineffability, immortality, omnipotence. There’s a difference between gods and mortals. How many gods have been killed in their lands? Valm has stories of the deaths of Mila and Duma; in days long gone by Marth struck down Gharnef and Medeus; across the ocean they are learning from the Jugdrali of the many deaths of Loptuous. Are any of these really gods?

Was Grima a god, or was Grima just something beyond the ken of mortals, a dragon so ancient it was no longer something that their minds could comprehend? Or is that what becomes _a god_? What is godhood, really, if not power so great that people believe you can grant miracles? Tiki has met Naga, spoken with her, and seems to find her not awe-inspiring in her godhood.

Should gods not inspire awe? Libra has never forgotten that awe and awesome share the same root as _awful_ , horrifying and astounding by turns. And Grima was.

He lays awake at night in silence, thinking, and builds an orphanage. He goes to chapel, but feels like he can’t pray. _Crisis of faith_ is all-consuming, the loss a total breakdown of everything that he used to know.

He listens to Robin’s breathing, and thinks about what makes a god.They have to thrive on belief. They need to have phenomenal cosmic power. They need to survive things that should kill them, or have some form of immortality. They need to be able to change the world, remake it in their own image. They need to inspire awe.

There is not any rule that says a god needs to be truly immortal, truly all-knowing. They do not have to have created the world, merely  _changed it_ to be in accordance to their own image. They must have skills and powers that other ordinary creatures do not, and to survive the unsurvivable. Has Robin not done that? Slayed the old generation, cast the false gods out and burned free the ghosts that remained in their absence? Has the world not changed and been molded by her hands, recreated to be something, if not _better,_ then at least _different_?

She should have died, but she came back, just as she had been before. She had guided the world as a ship safely between two narrow, painful straits, until they had come out the other side in fair sailing. She was sharper than any blade-edge he had ever tested, and when she looked upon him half the time he had to resist the urge to sink to his knees and pray.

Gods do not have to be born.

Gods could be made.

 

 

 

He gets up in the morning, and goes out to where Robin is fighting with three chickens that have pecked her hands to bleeding, and takes her in his arms, and lifts her off the ground as she giggles and shrieks and kisses her, and feels lighter from the moment he does. “What’s gotten into you?” Robin laughs. “You’ll make me drop the eggs!”

“Faith,” Libra replies, and goes to finish building his orphanage.

**Author's Note:**

> https://jonphaedrus.carrd.co


End file.
